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ooak ReviewsOTIS A. SINGLETARY, EditorThe King Ranch. By Tom Lea. Two volumes, Boston (Little,Brown and Company), 1957. Pp. 838. Illustrations, maps,notes, and index. $17.50.From this handsome set the reader's first impression is thegratifying assurance that the art of making fine books has not beenlost. The stately type, laid paper, blended maps and pictures, andsturdy binding would do honor to the master printers of a moreleisurely era. While the illustrations and maps are from the skilledhand of the author, earlier celebrated as an artist, credit for thedesign of the book goes to another Texan, Carl Hertzog. Theprinting was done in El Paso and the binding in San Antonio.Equally impressive is the digging that was done to assemble allthe information needed for this comprehensive work on the vastKing Ranch and its founder. For that, the author leaned on theresearch of Holland McCombs, who reached back to many obscuresources and brought out a store of enlightening details.Those credits do not detract from the praise deserved by TomLea for the writing. To his laurels as an artist and a novelist, hehas added equally green ones as a historian. In writing of RichardKing, the stowaway boy who became a steamboat captain on theRio Grande and later built one of the country's largest ranches,Lea applies an imaginative touch like that of Carl Sandburg intreating the prairie Lincoln. Yet he never lapses into distortionor fiction.Viewed from afar, the career of Captain King looks like atypical Horatio Alger tale; but Tom Lea shows that it involvedlong years of hard work, unusual patience, insight into frontierconditions, and faith in the future. To gain the bigger things hewanted to achieve, King dared to risk what he had.Lea notes that the King Ranch of today owes its eminence notonly to its founder but to his successors. The development was